Because of all that, I decided to go ahead and post Rita Dove's poem, "All Souls" **, because I really do like much of her work (especially *Mother Love* and the early stuff from *Thomas and Buelah*, including this more recent BAP 2004 poem. The category of "Mediocrities of the Moment" is a curious one that I don't think a lot of Dove's work belongs in (though I would agree that the work is uneven, some quite flat and perhaps born of some kind of poetic "mediocrity"). Dove's not trying in poetry to be particularly experimental, it should also be noted, though the poems can be witty, musical, and fractious in energetic ways that I like. On the other hand, I tend to agree completely that much of Billy Collins' work would fit such a category as "Mediocrities of the Moment."

I see Dove's poem below as a basic, human philosophizing and dialectical response in poetry to a life-catastrophe, a sort of -- 'okay I guess this experiential lyric questioning is what I *can* do after this catastrophe' -- & I never thought there might not be room in poetics for that kind of response in poetry--especially as pertains to ways given to the writing of everyday life. Collins's poems, by constrast, seem to me mostly smirky besmirches of everyday life & whinnying insincerity. It was only last summer (2003) that my literature students seriously wanted to *impeach* Collins from his post as Poet Laureate (see archives for texfiles from June-Sept, 03, and the same time's archives from Tim Yu's blog, Tympan, where the case was made and discussed at length).

Regarding BAP 2004, guest editor Lyn Hejinian discusses in her introduction, how, in part, she made her selections: she was, in a way, haunted by the "destructiveness" of the year 2003, what I take to mean the general cultural malaise of violence, war after war, the leaning upon of warring and divisiveness, at least as I interpret what I read in Hejinian's intro. I see Dove's poem, therefore, as certainly having great affinity in terms of what Hejinian, as (reader) editor, was responding to in selecting poems.

from Rita Dove, "All Souls" (BAP, 2004) *

Starting up behind them,
all the voices of those they had named:
mink, gander, and marmoset,
crow and cockatiel.
Even the duck-billed platypus,
of late so quiet in his bed,
sent out a feeble cry signifying
grief and confusion, et cetera.

Of course the world had changed
for good. As it would from now on
every day, with every twitch and blink.
Now that change was de rigueur,
man would discover desire, then yearn
for what he would learn to call
distraction. This was the true loss.
And yet in that first

unchanging instant,
the two souls
standing outside the gates
(no more than a break in the hedge;
how had they missed it?) were not
thinking. Already the din was fading.
Before them, a silence
larger than all their ignorance

yawned, and this they walked into
until it was all they knew. In time
they hunkered down to business,
filling the world with sighs--
these anonymous, pompous creatures,
heads tilted as if straining
to make out the words to a song
played long ago, in a foreign land.

(73-74)

from Dove's BAP commentary on the poem:

"Our house burned down after a lightning strike in 1998. During the subsequent rebuilding and refurnishing, I didn't have much inclination to write at all; it took about six months before the poems began to reappear--shy erratic blossoms poking their heads up through the ashes--and always without warning or, as far as I could tell, logic. The beginnings of *All Souls* arose at this time, the first scribbled entry in a brand-new notebook. I liked what was there--the cadences and authorial distance--but I didn't yet understand its urgency, its raison d'etre, so I put the draft away in a drawer. Then came 9/11, and somehow its haunting images of catastrophe sent me back to those abandoned lines. Endings, beginnings; to linger in regret or to move on: I found myself turning back to the front of that notebook, reconsidering what had been jotted down years before, in haste and incomprehension... and I finished the poem." (253)

* The Best American Poetry, 2004. Lyn Hejinian, guest editor. David Lehman, series editor. New York: Scribner, 2004.